Family Foto

A rare photograph of my little family.

Zen Mormons?

Friend of the blog ScottyDoo has posted a PDF link to an article from Sunstone about the potential mixing of yogic mantra meditation and Mormonism. I couldn't help but notice a few statements heard from more orthodox LDS members on the author's "bad religion" list. Gotta love liberal Mormons, going through life with one foot in the chapel and the other on a banana peel. Seriously, though, as a Zen type and a Westerner, I've occasionally toyed with the notion that Western faith traditions could benefit from adopting Eastern meditative practices. I really don't see the LDS Church officially adopting meditation as one of its practices, but this author seems to have integrated it into his own life without ditching his religious beliefs.

HDTV--the ultimate revelation?

I love Howard Beale's sermon in Network about the power of television, even as I love watching my selected shows--that season finale of The Office was great, and I can't wait for season two of Pushing Daisies. Network is one of my favorite movies, and it was downright prophetic about the blending of news, commentary, and entertainment. It was somewhat less prophetic about the quality of programming generally; IMHO, the proliferation of cable channels has led to better, less formulaic programming across the board.

All that said, we got our HDTV receiver from Direct TV on Saturday, and the picture quality is astonishing. I watched a rerun of Top Chef just to marvel at the resolution.

The Baptism Scene, 2008

Raising Money

Our St. Mary's Parents Group had a very successful fundraiser yesterday. We sold bowls painted by our children. Prominent chef John Folse kindly brought some members of his restaurant staff up from Baton Rouge and prepared gumbo to be eaten from the bowls. Actually, we gave folks plastic bowls to eat from after thinking through the hygeinics of the situation. Also, several businesses and individuals donated some very nice auction items; DW purchased a beautiful little necklace donated by a nun from Bangladesh.

I spent about two hours on Saturday afternoon rooting through almost all of the bowls, trying to find the three of our kids' eight that weren't in our reserved stack. I was able to find them by going through all of the unsigned bowls and examining the painting styles very closely. Once I assured myself beyond a reasonable doubt, I put three of the unsigned bowls in our stack. Because I became rather familiar with the bowls, DW and I were put in charge of distributing them.

Here I am in a white shirt and a green apron. Moving right along . . .

Bad-ass Texan

I picked up these two University of Texas ball caps at a truck stop on the way to Alexandria, LA, the other day, and placed them atop the table for A to choose the color he preferred.

As his mother predicted, A picked the black one.

We had very nice visits with our boys this past weekend. T got to swim in his very favorite outdoor pool, and he said his first whole sentence--"Look at the train!" A spent about two hours in the hotel's indoor swimming pool. We all had a lot of fun.

I'm becoming Tim Taylor

I've spent the last couple of weeks immersed in a gargantuan home improvement project that involves our bathrooms, our living and dining rooms, and our rotting back door. We've lived here almost 10 years and hadn't done a thing to the house except rip the carpet from the bathrooms (about 8 years ago), which left us with more functional but arguably less attractive concrete floors. I took this past week off of work when it became clear that our flooring project wasn't the picnic in the park I had thought it would be. We did our dining room a couple of weeks ago. This week it was the living room, which is rather large and full of little engineering challenges. We've got some finishing work to do, but the hard part is finally done. I spent as much time figuring out how to solve those engineering challenges as I did putting down flooring planks. Also, cutting moulding is way more difficult and time-consuming than I imagined it would be. Fortunately, it all worked out nicely. I started off rather lax, but became obsessive about craftsmanship towards the end. Shouldn't that work the other way around? What scares me is that I actually enjoy doing this. Now that I have dozens of new tools, I may become a (gasp) homeowner. It's a good thing that I only rented the nail gun that I used last night. It's pneumatic, but uses a tiny gas cartridge and a rechargeable battery instead of a clunky compressor. It is so cool that I would be nailing stuff just for fun if I actually owned that particular model. Hmmm. Pneumatic tools. I said in the title line that I'm becoming Tim Taylor. Perhaps Anton Chighur is a more apt comparison.

Of Baptisms and Beaches

I had a moment of panic a few days ago when I was told that T. is scheduled to take first communion on Mothers' Day, something that evidently is a tradition in the U.S. Catholic Church. As a lapsed non-Catholic Christian, this is a tradition I previously knew nothing about, and, no, my panic had nothing to do with anti-papism. We agreed to his Catholic religious education generally when we enrolled him at St. Mary's, and to his more active participation in the ceremonies a few months ago when we discovered that he actually enjoys the formal aspects of the Catholic service. I pointed out then that he hasn't been baptised, and that this might need to be remedied. I thought that maybe someone had forgotten or assumed that some church or other had baptised T. at birth, so I pointed it out again and asked whether we could arrange something. Such a panic is not unreasonable in a New Orleans area resident; in New Orleans, you are presumed Catholic until proven otherwise. However, T's baptism will occur on Mothers' Day also. On reflection, I told myself, "duh. Well, of course. They don't recognize any other church's baptisms, and they have it on record that our family is LDS. And with Benedict reiterating the stance that all other Christian faiths are heresies, they sure as shootin' ain't gonna have no heretic takin' no communion." So soon we will have three faith/spiritual traditions in our little family, with A. left to suggest whether he will follow any particular tradition. Seeing as how he has bit people during mass and has refused to kneel when we've attended the service there, I still regard him as a small-"p" protestant.

A.'s mother is very happy to know that I let him play on only the cleanest parts of the beach.

But what does it have to do with Yeats?

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
---Those dying generations---at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

So DW goes off to church on Sunday morning, and I sit down to watch the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. I, of course, was expecting a period piece about Yeats's trip from his homeland to the Continent to appreciate antiquities.



Instead, I get something coming from my own homeland of West Texas. This connection notwithstanding, I spent the entire film trying to figure out whether it was an adaptation of Yeats's poem or something else entirely. Sailing to El Paso would be more like it. I just couldn't figure it out.

I really liked this movie. The plot is nothing spectacular, and it would hard to divine some kind of deeper meaning from the film. But it is an excellent film nevertheless, if not quite the masterpiece that is There Will be Blood. A Texas ne'er-do-well (Josh Brolin) comes across some drug money and steals it, only to be chased through West Texas by a crazy hit man (Javier Bardem), who, in turn is chased by another hitman from his own organization (Woody Harrelson). The local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) is also chasing Brolin, mostly to save him from Bardem. Bardem deserves all of the praise he's been given; his character was frighteningly crazy and delciously creepy. Tommy Lee Jones didn't have as much screen time as I would have expected (or would have liked; I'd watch Tommy Lee Jones read the phone book), but his character is the old man who realizes that he is out of his element with archcriminals like Bardem's character on the loose. It really was no country for old men. The harsh storyline was matched by the harsh country of West Texas, much of which appears hot and lifeless. I, for one, liked the Sopranos-like ending, with the now-retired sheriff chatting away about nothing important. He isn't doing anything important, but he is alive.

Louisiana's Tom Sawyer

A modern-day warrior
Mean mean stride,
Todays Tom Sawyer
Mean mean pride.

Though his mind is not for rent,
Dont put him down as arrogant.
His reserve, a quiet defense,
Riding out the days events.
The river

And what you say about his company
Is what you say about society.
Catch the mist, catch the myth
Catch the mystery, catch the drift.

The world is, the world is,
Love and life are deep,
Maybe as his eyes are wide.

Todays Tom Sawyer,
He gets high on you,
And the space he invades
He gets by on you.

No, his mind is not for rent
To any God or government.
Always hopeful, yet discontent,
He knows changes arent permanent,
But change is.

And what you say about his company
Is what you say about society.
Catch the witness, catch the wit,
Catch the spirit, catch the spit.

The world is, the world is,
Love and life are deep,
Maybe as his skies are wide.

Exit the warrior,
Todays Tom Sawyer,
He gets high on you,
And the energy you trade,
He gets right on to the friction of the day.

--Rush, Tom Sawyer

Once again, my youngest son is showing his own sense of style. I don't know how he came across this hat, but it looks pretty damn good on him. At first, I thought about the Indiana Jones movies, but then Rush's old song about today's Tom Sawyer came to mind, and it seemed to fit his personality much better, except for the notion that he might accept change as a permanent phenomonon--that doesn't fit at all.



T. had a difficult weekend at home. His obsession with elevators and airplanes led to a major behavioral meltdown at a shopping mall in Metairie, LA. Surprisingly, he was very happy when we went straight home after we dragged him kicking and screaming from the mall, and he didn't ask for elevators or airplanes again. Later, we went to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. T. insisted on going to the beach adjacent to the Pass Christian yacht club and shrimp boat harbor. We used to go to that strip of beach because it had a bathroom pavilion and a McDonald's across the street. Both the pavilion and the McDonald's were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and neither has been rebuilt. On Friday, for the first time ever, T. insisted that he was going to walk along the harbor's concrete seawall. Unfortunately, the seawall too was damaged by Katrina, and I thought it unsafe for him to walk on it. Also, building contractors were on-site yesterday, rebuilding structures that were flattened by the storm. Again, he had to be dragged back to the car kicking and screaming.

I felt terrible for T. over the weekend. He is rapidly entering puberty, so his hormones are wreaking all kinds of havok. The OCD component of his autism seems to have intensified. Moreover, he seems to be wanting to drop his obsessions in favor of other activities, but can't quite seem to do so. Fortunately, it will be warm enough to put up our backyard swimming pool before his next visit home.



T. is learning to write his name again. When he was 4 or 5, he was able to write his name and write some numbers. We got very excited and bought an easel that I set up on a Friday afternoon. He woke up on Saturday morning and had completely lost his ability to write anything. T. has a seizure disorder--one that is so mild the best course of treatment is to just watch it instead of medicating--and we suspect that he had a seizure that Friday night several years ago. Around one-third of children with autism also have epilepsy; I really don't know how the two are connected. T. is just starting to regain his writing skills. In this photo, he has drawn an elevator with a stick figure of himself riding on it. I almost cried when I saw him writing his letters.

No cheesy smiles

T says "cheese."

Whoever designed our local mall's Easter display needs to feel the sting of the lash. Almost immediately after I took this photo, A. looked down next to the fountain and saw some large, colorful, lightweight Easter Eggs. I stopped him from actually throwing one into the fountain, but I couldn't blame him for trying. A certainly isn't the only kid who would be tempted by such a set-up. The same mall used to have small rocks in the planters underneath the trees surrounding the fountains, and those rocks had a bad way of finding their way into the water.

King Neptune raising the waves.

Commentary?

Non-gainful gain?

The past couple of morning zazen sittings were outstanding. A couple of weeks ago, I had an electronic conversation with one of my gentle readers about the apparent tension between the Zen concept of no-gain and the feeling that we get gain because sometimes things are just better somehow after sitting. We must get some kind of gain out of what we do, as we keep going back for more, and Zen isn't the type of spiritual practice Americans would do out of tradition or social obligation. Moreover, I did not get into Zen practice as part of a search for any enlightenment or ultimate revelation (for now, I'm content with the transient, impermanent human truth works for me at the moment). Rather, I was simply trying out something that seemed like it might create a space of tranquility in a chaotic mind. At the time, tranquility was a major gain. Of course, with Buddhism being a non-dualistic philosophy, it could be that gain and no-gain aren't in any tension at all, but are somehow one and the same and can be held in a perfect balance.

Language Cake

I started reading Irish novelist Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls the other day. The book is set in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War; perhaps it's a kind of new wave Gone With the Wind (which I found rather dull, quite honestly). This book was highly praised by critics of all stripes in the TLS, and I can see why. O'Connor's language is like a very rich piece of chocolate mousse cake that I can only eat a little bite of at a time. I find myself rereading paragraphs just for the pleasure of nibbling at the author's delicious dessert of words, so I haven't reached page 30 yet. To wit:

She had not been walking long when it started to happen. Everything was coming to merit attention. A rice-field. Two flies. A dead chicken-hawk in a gully. The eyes of hungry alligators resentful in the slime. All of it seemed equal, which is one definition of madness. The weight of the world had lost proportion.

There were days when she hobbled until the world began to shimmer. The sky billowed around her like the folds of the apocalypse and the white-hot egg of pain in her breast threatened to crack with a seepage of venom.

Goodness knows how long it's going to take for me to reach the end of this novel

Go Blue!

Now here's an odd fact--38 of the 43 U.S. Presidents have had blue eyes, yet we blue eyed types currently make up only 16% of the U.S. population (down from 50% in 1900). Maybe I'll enter the 2012 race.

Annoyingly Effective

Well, this "Dear Adoptee" letter certainly brightened up my Friday. There's no "non-ID" file in Austin with my name on it; I've already signed up for the registry she mentions; and there is no agency from which I can obtain anything. Moreover, I finally got an answer to my petition to unseal my adoption file--"no," by non-ruling. If I feel a need to refile, I'll load the petition up with documentation to create a nice record on appeal. I found this most recent letter sufficiently off-putting that I began thinking of this as more of a long-term campaign with lots of zigs, zags, and inching forward than as a quick march to victory. I sat down and wrote a list of questions and identified some resources that might lead me in the right direction. We'll see what happens.

Of Bowls and Behaviors

I visited the Autism Center at St. Mary's the other day. Each of my boys has his own training room, where he recieves 1:1 ABA training per day. Both of them are doing well with their current objectives.

The St. Mary's Parents Group is holding a fundraiser in April, the Greco Bowl, honoring the late Bishop Charles Greco. This is our first attempt at this kind of fundraiser, but it has great potential. The kids are painting bowls, which a regionally renowned chef (John Folse, who has a show on PBS) will fill with gumbo. The diner then keeps the bowl. We're probably going to reserve all of our kids' bowls and give out a few as gifts.

A. has a minor case of sinusitis this weekend, but he had a great time playing in the warm water of the hotel swimming pool.

T. had an up-and-down weekend at home. We're working through a period of obsessive/compulsive behavior that can be painful to observe. As God is my witness, I had no idea that Clearview Mall has two key-operated freight elevators with the doors permanently opened (what, were teenagers having sex in there or something?). Also, the other elevator we had been riding stopped on us. Not good. Not good at all. However, there was a stiff wind coming off the gulf, and T. was able to play in a nice little surf, albeit while wearing a long sleeved boatsman's shirt. That was fun. This morning, T. was extra clever. He saw some unfolded swimsuits on the couch, so he found a suitcase and packed it with the swimsuits. If he could get that suitcase into the car, it would mean we would have to check into the hotel to go swimming. Not bad reasoning, and it took some planning.

Water and Sky

I took my kayak out on Saturday morning, paddling down Cane Bayou into Lake Pontchartrain and back. It was a fabulous day for paddling, with a temperature in the high 60s and a gorgeous blue sky. We're going through the fabulous sci-fi Western Firefly on DVD at home right now, and I thought of the theme song to that show as I lay back in the kayak, floated along, and looked up at the sky:

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me.

Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me.

Leave the men where they lay
They'll never see another day
Lost my soul, lost my dream
You can't take the sky from me.

I feel the black reaching out
I hear its song without a doubt
I still hear and I still see
That you can't take the sky from me.

Lost my love, lost my land
Lost the last place I could stand
There's no place I can be
Since I've found Serenity

And you can't take the sky from me.

A few hours later, I was at the theater watching There Will Be Blood. One can't spend an entire Saturday lazing around outside.

Instant American Classic

Holy crap! gentle readers, I saw There Will Be Blood last night. I've thought about it a little, and it may be one of the best movies I've ever seen.

There is very little blood and there an ocean of oil in the movie, so it could be that the title is an allusion to certain events in the Middle East, in which oil, religion, and violence are all whooshed up together, but that may be a stretch. If it is indeed a "message movie," that fact is so subtle that it shouldn't stop anyone from seeing the movie.

The film takes place in the New Mexico and California oil fields right around the beginning of the 20th Century. Like Citizen Kane,, the movie is about greed and paranoid, ruthless ambition. The greed, paranoia, and ambition here are served up with strong flavorings of rage and resentment. The protagonist and antagonist in the film are oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and dirt-poor preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) of the Church of the Third Revelation. One online reviewer referred to Plainview's business and Sunday's church as the twin churches of greed, and, in the film, that's exactly what they are. Plainview and Sunday are very much alike, and their relationship in the movie is a cycle of provocation and vengeance. Throughout the film, each is able to see through the other, and it seems that they can see something of themselves in each other.

The movie opens with a sequence of oil drilling scenes, with several minutes of no dialogue at all. Men are in claustrophobic, dusty, narrow holes in the ground, almost as if they are both injuring the Earth and digging their own graves. Quite a metaphor there. With a few exceptions, the landscape is a parched, nearly lifeless desert, much as Daniel Plainview's soul. The movie was filmed near Marfa, Texas. I've always wanted to visit the Big Bend country.

Much has been made of Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, and it is great. However, I was very impressed with Paul Dano (Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine), who carries his rage, ambition, and greed in a more tightly controlled and devious fashion than Day-Lewis does--and his sermons are absolutely fabulous. The hustling preacher was a fixture on the American frontier, and Dano does that character justice--as Plainview said after one of his sermons, "that was a goddamn hell of a show!"

There Will Be Blood is a great movie. The pacing is a bit slow for anybody expecting rapid action, and director Thomas Paul Anderson gets a bit artsy, but only momentarily. This is one of those movies that people will be watching 50 years from now, it's that good.

Super-dee-duper Bowl

Damn, that was a great game last night. I was pulling for the Giants--not because I have anything against New England, but it's always fun to see a huge build-up come crashing down. Also, the Giants have played scrappy football for the past several weeks, and I like scrappy teams. The Giants played the Pats very hard in week 17, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise that they were up to the task of beating the 18-0 Patriots in the Super Bowl. What was surprising was how effectively the Giants' defense shut down New England's offense--the highest scoring offense in NFL history, IIRC. DW started the game leaning slightly towards New England, but she damn near leapt from her chair during the Giants' final drive, when Eli Manning sprang loose from a certain tackle and threw that incredible pass to David Tyree, then tossed the ball into the end zone for the winning touchdown shortly thereafter. It may have been the best Super Bowl ever.

A is for attitude